Posts Tagged ‘DC Universe’

By now you’ve probably seen the news. If not, see this announcement from Upper Deck.

Well, this obviously isn’t a surprise. But I am surprised just how sad it makes me to see the official announcement. This is a damn shame. Yeah, the writing has been on the wall for a long time. But it’s sad news nonetheless.

Is Vs. dead? No. The fans will keep the game alive. People will continue playing with the cards Upper Deck released. And we will continue to provide new content.

The original DCU project started in response to the announcement that there would be no new DC content for Vs. Now that there will be no new official content for Vs, the guys on the project have re-dedicated themselves to the idea of putting out top-flight fan-made content.

What can you expect from us? You’ll get the best fan-made sets we can deliver. DCU was fun, but it wasn’t polished enough. Our next set, DFC, will be better. We’ve been hard at work on it for months. Currently, we are knee-deep in playtesting to make sure this set stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the best sets Upper Deck ever released.

I can’t tell you exactly when DFC will be released. I do not want to put it out there unfinished like we did with DCU. But we will give you updates here as they become available.

After DFC, the future’s a little less certain. We may branch out into Marvel content. We’ll probably take on a few new team members as we ramp up our output. And, I’d like to go back and polish DCU someday. Whatever the future holds, you can count on us to provide new Vs. content.

The game will not die as long as the fans want to continue playing it.

SeventhSoldier here, with a design article for the team you’ve been watching for the last few days: The Rogues. When it was first decided that the Speed Force would finally get a full-team feature, we thought about things for a little while, and we realized that we just couldn’t have The Flash show up without giving due to his villains.

The Rogues were a tough team to design. What do they have in common? Well…they don’t like the Flash. But, some of them do. Some of them have powers from tech, some have natural powers. They’re all in it for different reasons, they all do things different ways. How do you design a team that seems to have no unifying theme?

Well, the first thing I did was do a little research. Specifically, one of the most Rogue-rich stories in recent memory, I looked at Rogue War, by Geoff Johns. This is the first time I realized, though I saw it in Countdown as well, just how divided the Rogues were. When Captain Cold was in charge, there were rules – no drugs, no killing speedsters. Blacksmith and her Rogues, on the other hand, were a little more ruthless. On either side? James Jesse and a few others, Rogues who reformed and helped the police track down and deal with the remaining Rogues – and Inertia, Zoom, and other evil speedsters known for wanton brutality.

All this under my belt, I began to revise my character list. There are some characters I wanted in there because they were Names – like Gorilla Grodd – who I realized didn’t fit well on any of these groups. There are some characters on there I just thought would be amusing – Folded Man, or Dr. Alchemy. Again, these Rogues didn’t have a particular affiliation. I dropped them.

Most of the Rogues didn’t want to kill the Flash. They wanted to beat him, they wanted to slow him down, they wanted to make money, but they didn’t want to kill the Flash. But how would that come out? I ended up deciding that they were stalling. They didn’t know how to end things. Either they’d get caught, or they’d kill the Flash, right? Wrong. Instead, they just kept the game going as long as they could, and eventually the situation resolved itself when the Flash ran afoul of someone else – like, say, the Black Flash.

So, I began to build them as a stall team, and I realized that, for Cold’s crew, it worked, and I felt like Cold’s crew was important enough to the legend of the Flash to receive a legendary support card, and they built themselves like that.

But I’ve mentioned before how important version was – and Cold’s Rogues operated quite differently from Blacksmith’s Rogues, a slightly more straightforward group focused on causing damage as quickly as possible.

As I said, there are essentially four small teams within the Rogues. The Speedsters are brutal, but they hurt you almost as much as they hurt your opponents. Blacksmith’s Rogues are thugs, heavy and simple. Cold’s Rogues keep things going as long as possible. The Reformed Rogues wait until the fight starts before they unleash their full powers.

The goal, and the hardest part, was to make sure that they worked great both within and without their specific group. I’ll leave it up to you to decide how well we succeeded, but I think that they work well together. In the face of a common enemy, the Rogues will unite, despite their differences, and I hope that this comes out when you see the finalized team.

Tomorrow brings a more morally ambiguous team to the table, and enjoy that, and I hope you all keep enjoying the unofficial DC Universe.

Yesterday, we saw Sudden Storm, the legendary plot twist for one of the Rogues – Weather Wizard. Now, as you might guess, there’ll be more than one Weather Wizard in the set, and one was scheduled to preview that day. However, we haven’t seen it pop up, and I think that it’s important, when judging a legendary support card, to see at least an example of the character it supports.

Bad weather can be a hassle, as we all know. It rarely lasts long, but it just slows everything down. Traffic comes to a crawl, runners stay at home, walkers have to push through rain, wind, and snow. So, the Weather Wizard does pretty much the same thing – he may not kill you, but he’ll certainly slow you down.

Weather Wizard, Cold’s Rogues certainly won’t be stunning anybody else without some outside aid. When you drop him, you’re dedicating him to NOT attacking, because all that’ll net you is an exhausted character. But he’s an impressive wall for your opponents, sitting at what is essentially a 0/5. Most 3-drops can stun him unaided, but there are a few that can – and perhaps more importantly, he can force the pump if a single Sudden Storm pops up.

So that’s the preview for today. I hope you’ve enjoyed, and we’ll be back tomorrow to talk about who the Rogues are and how they came to be.